Deliverance of the Daughters of Daniel Boone and Callaway, plate two from Histoire des Premiere Colons d'Amerique

Art Historical Context

Karl Bodmer’s “Deliverance of the Daughters of Daniel Boone and Callaway” captures a dramatic moment from early American frontier history. Created in 1852 as the second plate in the French publication *Histoire des Premiers Colons d’Amérique*, the lithograph illustrates the 1776 rescue of Jemima Boone and the Callaway sisters after their capture by a Shawnee war party. Bodmer, best known for his precise ethnographic studies of Native peoples along the Missouri River, here turns his attention to a story already mythologized in American lore. Printed as a tinted lithograph on ivory wove paper, the work exemplifies the mid-nineteenth-century taste for widely distributable historical imagery. The medium allowed fine gradations of tone and subtle color, lending an almost painterly quality to the scene of armed frontiersmen charging through dense woodland. Through this print, European audiences encountered a romanticized vision of American colonial conflict, blending adventure with the period’s growing interest in national origin stories. Now part of the Art Institute of Chicago’s collection of prints and drawings, the sheet preserves both the visual drama of the event and the technical sophistication of early lithography, inviting viewers to consider how images shaped public understanding of the nation’s past.

About the Artist

Karl Bodmer · 1809–1893

Johann Carl Bodmer was born on February 11, 1809, in Zürich, Switzerland, and received his training as a painter and engraver under his uncle Johann Jakob Meier, who had himself studied under the prominent engraver Heinrich Füssli. By the late 1820s Bodmer had relocated to Koblenz, Germany, where his work came to the attention of Prince Maximilian zu Wied-Neuwied, a German naturalist-explorer plan...